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In this week’s TLS

New biographies of Gandhi, Bob Dylan and others, in the Christmas double issue of the TLS – A note from the Editor

Published: 18 December 2013

T
o those readers already sated with sugared platitudes of the season, this is
a bracing, salted double edition of the TLS. James Campbell delivers
a damning verdict on the new, much-publicized biography
of J. D. Salinger, the official book of the little-acclaimed new film
about the author of The Catcher in the Rye. Campbell detects two
dominant theses, about war and sex, neither of which convince. He fails to
detect an index to the 600 pages because, bizarrely for such a book, the
publishers saw no need for one. Daniel Karlin has been considering another
life of a legend, Ian Bell’s massive work on Bob Dylan, in which the early
period comes with not a single new fact or forgotten witness, and the rest
is resonant (very slightly) with “summary lessons on major events”. Neither
Gandhi nor his latest biographer emerge well from R. W. Johnson’s review of
the Mahatma’s life in South Africa before 1914: Ramachandra Guha’s account,
however, is “suffused with a sort of euphoric glow from the
Gandhi-yet-to-come era in India”. Michael Dirda, formerly of the former Washington
Post Book World, recounts his memories of Christmas times gone by, when
books were bought, rated in lists, but not very much read.

The TLS does turn out to have one set of holiday heroes this year, the
bakers of cakes based on modern works of art, like the Richard Avedon
parfait of bees which graces our cover. And there is credit too for the
cooks of the Soviet Union, those inventive mistresses of the arts of
Stalinist cod and processed cheese. Lesley Chamberlain praises a
memoir by Anya von Bremzen that offers nostalgia, tragedy and “absurdity
by the ladleful”.

Finally, for all those anxious about the future of all newspapers this festive
tide, Nicholas Lemann salutes George Brock’s Out
of Print, which “deals comprehensively, intelligently and
unsentimentally with the entire range of major questions about journalism
now”. Brock’s book is the “best single source available for wisdom and
context about the situation as a whole”, a verdict which sounds like a
recommendation for the Christmas trade but might be better kept for when
reality and reading return in the New Year.